Update: In light of recent changes to the game, which have made Capture the Flag mode playable only via a randomised “Variety” mode and in Private Matches, I retract much of what caused me to recommend the game below. See more here.

Titanfall is a first-person shooter with a story but no singleplayer mode. That means that if you play its nine campaign maps through, no NPC ever calls you by name as they remind you to reload, no dastardly villain ever traps you in a small container and takes away your weapons, and no scripted sidekick ever makes an awkward joke about why you never speak. Its story and its characters play out as radio plays, picture-in-picture talking heads, and brief pre- and post-mission cutscenes, but in each you’re treated as just another anonymous soldier. You exist only to be shoved out of a dropship in order to fight in brief, 15-minute matches of what are, essentially, dressed-up versions of six vs. six team deathmatch and capture-and-hold modes.

This is a great thing. Freed from the anxious need to convince you that you’re special, Titanfall instead builds a set of systems within which heroism and glory occur naturally. There is no “Titan level” akin to Battlefield’s brief jet sections; there is instead the ability, every two minutes, to summon your own robot buddy from orbit. There is no running up to a door and waiting like a patient dog while an NPC master runs over to open it for you; there is instead the ability to overcome any obstacle with wall-running and double-jumping, and the opportunity to skillfully chain those moves together into swift, balletic combat.

There is, instead, a whole different set of problems to complain about. This is Wot I Think.

You’re maybe doing a little maths in your head right now. If there are only nine campaign maps, and each only takes around 15-minutes to play – sometimes less – doesn’t that make Titanfall extremely short? Yes, it does. You can play through its campaign in around 90 minutes, and while you then have the opportunity to play it a second time as the opposing side, there’s no forks in the road or changes in outcome to discover, whether your team loses every round or wins every round. Whatever you do during its matches, your killing, dying, capturing, holding, obviously aren’t vital to the fight the story is about.

Similarly, the campaign isn’t vital to your enjoyment of the game. The story, which is about futuristic spaceships, distant worlds, some corporate guys who are dicks, some freedom-loving guys who I guess probably aren’t such large dicks, and who are led by a former corporate guy and, look, I’ve played it through more than once and I still don’t care. It’s a thin, unobtrusive excuse to fill levels with smashed machinery, orbital lasers, and for some reason dinosaurs.

The best way to run around amidst those excused scifi elements and dinosaurs is instead in the game’s capture the flag mode. Which I would not have guessed in advance. Titanfall turns out not to be so much a game about fighting robots or a daring merging of singleplayer and multiplayer. Instead it’s a Capture The Flag game where every soldier is a parkour expert, and where leaping onto the backs and into the bellies of mechs is just another part of your movement set, alongside leaping through windows and clambering on top of buildings.

Capture The Flag is the best way to experience that skillset, because it’s the mode that puts the most demands on the precision and speed of a player’s movement. Grabbing the flag causes you to appear as a HUD icon to every player on the server, meaning you’re a suddenly visible target for every other pilot and robot in the vicinity. The first thing you’ll want to do is get high, to where Titans can’t follow. It’s only ever a hop, skip and a leap to the nearest rooftop, and from there you need never touch the ground again.

This creates moments of system-created heroism. I prefer to play defense, but as I sat in my mech, firing rockets and missing a fleeing flag carrier as she sprinted along the side of a tubular glass corridor, I couldn’t help but picture how the set-up appeared from her perspective. She was briefly the player-character of an action set-piece designed around her, my inaccurate shots lighting her heels.

Sitting inside your mech is the most obvious way to interact with your robot pal, but the speed and agility and gleeful fun of leaping around means I far prefer remaining on foot. I deploy my Titan instead as a battlefield assistant. There is a map – I don’t know its name, for reasons I’ll explain later – in which a large, central warehouse divides the level, and smaller buildings, crates and walls litter routes towards each team’s flag.

I like to fight a little, till my Titan is ready, then set my ro-bro to Guard mode next to the flag while I double-jump-wall-run my way to the top of the warehouse. From there I sit with a sniper rifle trained back towards the flag. If any opponent arrives in their own robot, my mech is waiting and will scrap without my involvement. If an enemy arrives on foot, my robot will engage them and I get the points for anyone it kills. If anyone is quick enough to get away, there’s a long courtyard for them to traverse and for me to train my sniper sights upon them.

This is just one instance in which Titans feel like the best possible teammate. On tighter maps, I switch to a shotgun, pop my Titan on follow mode and we move across the level as a unit. While he watches the streets, I hop in windows and across rooftops. If we meet an enemy Titan, my buddy causes enough of a distraction that I can rodeo on top of his opponent, open a compartment, and fire directly into its metal brain. If we meet a pilot on foot, even if I die, there’s a chance my Titan will avenge me and still be waiting when I respawn. If occasionally he would flip me a giant piece of spare change, I’d like my Titan more than I do BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth.

I wrote in my beta impressions post that I was surprised and impressed that piloting Titans didn’t feel like a separate game detached from the ground combat, and that’s still true. Titans are a tactical consideration, as core to whatever plan you’re forming as the weapon in your hand. They’re also moving level geometry. I’ve spent a lifetime glitchily, laggily balancing myself on top of friendly plane wings and jeep bonnets in various multiplayer games; I rarely hitch a ride on the back of a teammate’s Titan, but it’s so important that I can if I want to and that it just works.

Even with familiar game modes and familiar weapons, every part of Titanfall just works, clicking together in ways impressive enough to rise far above any dull, cynical dismissal of the game as ‘Call of Duty with robots’.

I say all this in spite of being someone who dies a lot. This seems worth stating. I like to measure games by the skill and finesse they allow within their systems, but also by how fun they are if you’re incapable of either. There was a moment yesterday in which I grabbed an opposing team’s flag and, in the same instant, pointed to a distant spot and summoned my Titan to land there from orbit. I double-jumped through a window and again on to a rooftop, before wall-running along a provided metal sheet to pick up enough speed that my next jump took me over to a higher, adjacent building. As I leapt off the other side, my Titan thumped down, caught me in mid-air and tucked me inside its tummy. From there, I crossed the map, strode into combat with a waiting posse of enemy robots, used the rocketing eject button to blast myself into the sky, and steered my descent back to earth towards my own team’s flag and my first capture point.

In another moment yesterday, I moved to leap from a window, caught the sill instead and wall-ran 180-degrees around to face the room I was trying to leave. I then reflexively double-jumped and landed on top of the ceiling’s light fixtures.

I’ve raved in over half of all my RPS posts about the importance of movement being fun in first-person shooters, and of how much I love skiing in Tribes. Truthfully though, I’m not very good at skiing either, and there’s always a point where I bounce off a rock and all my momentum dribbles away. At that point I’m just jogging along, hoping the next slope comes soon.

That’s not an issue in Titanfall. At this stage, I feel like I’m repeating those early scenes in a superhero movie in which Spider-Man or Iron Man first learns to use their powers. My rocket boosters are punting me erratically around the room, or I’m falling inertly from a rooftop, but there’s never any point where I’m not having fun.

I sort of wish I could just stop writing there. As a game, as a piece of design, as a set of systems which coalesce and entwine in clever, remarkable, original ways, Titanfall is fun to play and fun to write about. I’m going to keep playing it. I hope lots of other people play it.

Except, the reason I don’t know the names of any of the maps is that you can’t ever select which map you want to play. You pick “Classic”, then what game mode, and the matchmaking places you and whoever else is in your lobby together in a match you can’t customise.

There are no dedicated servers of any kind. There is no support for establishing or maintaining clans. There will never be any mods. Titanfall is currently £45 from Origin (£33 from Amazon in a box), with a £20 season pass available for unannounced future DLC. That DLC will probably consist of sets of map packs and, if Call of Duty and Battlefield are anything to go by, each one will split the multiplayer community between the haves and have nots.

You should always judge a game by what it is and not by what it’s not, but there’s a gulf between the way in which I want to interact with mulitplayer first-person shooters and the manner in which Titanfall has been provided. It won’t stop me playing, but it might stop me playing for as long. That’s a shame.

Hopefully you’ll forgive my slightly off-topic comment, Lord Custard, but I saw your name and thought I’d share. A few weeks ago I had a bizarre dream in which I was commenting on your website on a very regular basis. We were the best of Internet Friends! Thus ends my strange dream. The whole thing was strange because I’ve been to your website maybe twice. But there you go. Moving on!

This is the grim darkness of the far future. Epic has been out of print so long, I think the Adepts at the citadel forgeworld have not only forgotten how to built titans, but that they ever built titans at all.

There is an option to start and end it with the game, take out all ingame features and have it minimized at all times. This way you can use Steam instead, with the exception of achievements and friendslist!

Also, for some reason Origin downloads are nearly ten times faster for me. Which is nice with a 50 gigabyte download…

Origin shows the install/unpacking speed as part of the download manager (Steam just shows the download). It simply can’t download faster than your ISP can provide, which is always suspect when (in my case, for example) Origin states I’m downloading at a whopping 25MB/s, while my ISP physically only supports at maximum, uncompromised, off-peak downloading at 6MB/s.

It’s not really about the distribution platform, it’s about the launcher. Steam provides a really convenient way of downloading, installing, uninstalling, reinstalling, launching and patching games that you’ve bought. Unfortunately, it’s only useful for games bought through the Steam store.

Ideally launchers should be separated from distribution. Consumers could choose the launcher of their choice and then have the choice of plugging multiple distribution platforms into that perform all their functions using standardised protocols.

Of course, Valve wouldn’t want that, because as things stand their super convenient launcher/patcher gives them a stranglehold on the PC games digital distribution market. A shame.

Is it a shame? Because I look at the travesties that Ubisoft and EA inflict on us in order to play their games, and consider how much worse it could be had those companies actually displayed a modicum of foresight. Let’s not even mention the late, unlamented Games For Windows Live.

And god help us if it had been some brick and mortar sales outfit who’d won the digital distribution game.

Oh come on. Decrying “hipsters” is the most tiresome trend in every kind of commentary. Caring about things you don’t isn’t some smug pose: People actually care about having to depend on clumsy launchers to get at their games.

Wulfram: Before everyone was wailing about hipsters, which was when the hipster thing was already dead, hipsters themselves were doing that as some sort of ironic joke and everything became way too meta. Take a look at the website hipsterrunoff.com for example and you will see what I mean.

Steam don’t offer the “buy to try” option. But most companies do offer the “try before you buy” option of a demo.
I’d prefer not putting cash up front to find out I don’t like a game. But sadly neither platform offers enough demos (which is mainly down to the Developers and not Steam, on Origin I’d not know though).

It would be, but Origin isn’t a Steam competitor, it’s a company store for EA that happens to offer a few other games and largely disdains the sort of sales that made Steam such a juggernaut. Because believe you me, Steam didn’t take off because everyone loves paying full retail prices for things with a whole passle of restrictions that retail games didn’t have. I never touched it before they started doing their sales, and I’m sure I’m nowhere near alone on that. (Though, to be fair, I’m not a huge Valve fanboy. I liked HL2 quite a bit, Portal 1 and 2 were great, and TF2 comes closest of any multiplayer shooter to working for me but still fails, but I don’t think they would have been sufficient to get me to use Steam. Especially before I actually tried Portal, since I was skeptical about it originally.)

Not that your points aren’t valid, but I think you’re oversimplifying. There are other factors behind Steam being successful, and one of those is the way in which it is a far better experience in many ways than buying retail boxes is. Speaking as someone who switched over to Linux about a decade ago, it seemed increasingly weird and archaic even to have to install programs with different, siloed installers, much less to get some retail box containing an optical disc that the programs are installed via. Having everything managed by a central repository and interacting with it via a single frontend makes a lot of sense; Steam is basically a package manager for games. Not, the 5 billionth time you install and start a new game and it once again runs the DirectX installer it’s pretty clear that Windows still lacks modern package management and dependency resolution. But at least for the most part, Steam makes the games aspect more bearable.

And of course, these days everybody has app stores on their phones, so even the non-geeks are experiencing some meager modicum of software repositories. Steam is exactly that, it’s the App Store or Play Store or whatever but for games on PCs. That’s a way of looking at things that people increasingly have; soon kids will just assume there’s some app store thingy for every platform, and Steam has managed to be that for x86-based gaming. You don’t have to hunt down the website, create some new account, install a weird download utility—nope, it’s just that you hear about a game, and so you search for it on Steam. Done.

You’re paying a big premium for the chance to get a refund though – I presume you only get it from a purchase on Origin. I got a CD key for £30 from a third party, it costs £45 on Origin. I happen to like it, thankfully, but I doubt I would have got that refund if I’d tried.

I couldn’t agree with this more. I’m not a huge fan of Origin, but I like that they are out there and at least attempting to open up the competitive field. How can that not be of benefit to gamers? I have tons of games on Steam but have never been able to get a response from their customer support AT ALL. Not once, and I’ve emailed them countless times with questions.

Locking on was fine in Section 8 though it was not possible to kill an opponent with a single lock-on. But I guess the CoD combat model makes killing people generally less of a deal than it was in S8 so it evens out.

Because it’s not a great gun. The best way to use it is to fire three separate times, and that generally only works against people still foolish enough to be playing this game like CoD with robots. Decent players aren’t going to be spending much time running through corridors or rooms or being on the ground in general, and when someone is running across walls and leaping between rooftops you’re honestly better off with just about any other gun.

To be honest, the relative uselessness of the smart pistol is one of the things that annoys me about this game. It’s got movement that’s more reminiscent of Unreal Tournament or Quake III or Tribes, but the guns are boring modern military fare. The smart pistol is the one interesting idea in the bunch, and nine out of ten times you’re better off taking something else. The ordnance options are uninspired too – frag, EMP, C4, and mines, exactly what you’d expect. It’s not really affecting my enjoyment of the game all that much, but it’s frustrating that Respawn came so close to understanding what’s wrong with modern multiplayer shooters without quite getting there.

Anyone complaining about the smart gun fundamentally misunderstands the smart gun. In any confrontation with a halfway decent player, they’ll pop a few in your skull before you’ve even gotten the second lock (out of three). It’s only really useful for killing the AI enemies in droves and getting a guaranteed kill if you can get the drop on an enemy…which you’ll be guaranteed anyways if you don’t have an unfortunate handspasm.

I picked it up and it is very enjoyable. The setting, aesthetics and movement are all fantastic. My biggest complaint is with the weapon handling, recoil, etc. It feels completely copy pasta’d from Call of Duty (not really a surprise honestly). The weapon sounds also aren’t that great. They don’t have weight or feel like they pack a punch.

Yeah, that was my biggest anti-hype reason, I don’t like CoD’s “hide and seek” combat where it’s mostly about being the first to spot the enemy. Overall Titanfall seems like a modernized, i.e. far more polished but also very simplified, Section 8. Except with combat from a series I don’t like.

I like the game and all, but I feel like it’s a little less than Call of Duty offers. It just doesn’t feel like there are a lot of weapons/items (and maybe there are, maybe there aren’t), and whenever I see a planet or the stars, I cringe a little at the lack of polish.

That said, I’m not very interested in what Call of Duty offers, haven’t been in a while, but Titanfall has really been scratching a good itch.

I kind of feel like just having a double-jump and wall run doesn’t really count as great movement, but that may be because I’m a horrendous old fart and “good movement” which has been mandated by the developer doesn’t feel anywhere near as exciting as the old straffle-and-rocket-jump days.

(Just to prove that I am too legit to quit: I felt the same way about the movement in UT2003 when they put in the double/wall jump)

It just seems real lazy that the outcome of each map does not effect how the story goes. Why doesn’t the story arc depend on the outcome of each mission with 3-5 possible finishes to the campaign? Also, why is it limited to Hardpoint and Attrition only?

Most of the intros to the campaign missions are great setpieces. During the mission where the capital ship warps into orbit and a space battle is happening is awesome to look up at. But really it is all meaningless.

Titanfalling onto another Titan and the various ways you jump into your Titan will never get old.

To be fair a branching campaign would be really difficult to do when every mission must be populated with players. Brink almost did it with what-if scenarios, out of the 8 maps in the game each campaign uses only 6, the other two are treated as what would have happened if you failed X other mission (because the main path assumes that you win every mission) and each what-if mission is a regular campaign mission in the opposite campaign. Of course Brink’s game mode is always assault which is more conducive for storytelling than plain old arena combat (I believe even UT’s Assault maps loosely formed a campaign).

Killzone 3 actually had a multiplayer mode I was very fond of in which you play on a map for an hour or so but with varying objectives that took place in varying parts of the map like rush in the newer Battlefields. You’d start out with one objective, and depending on which team won, it’d push the balance to a different part of the map and a different objective. Your team lost at defending the things that needed to be blown up, so now win a straight up deathmatch, after which you can do capture points. I believe there were mini-cutscenes, or maybe just bookends. I expected something more like that, at least, once I heard about the campaign and was a little disappointed that it was just brief engagements with relatively interesting intros and either a “we won” or “we lost.”

It would be nice if you didn’t resort to using a term like ‘lazy’ in your criticism of the campaign. Sure it would be better if it had more depth but this is a game designed solely for multiplayer and attempts to generate its enjoyment from the systems Graham described, not an engrossing story. It was never meant to be a focus and they never claimed it as such.

To insinuate that someone at Respawn just kinda ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to also make a detailed branching campaign is really selling them short. There may be plenty of valid criticisms you might be able to throw at them but ‘lazy’ is not one of them.

The penultimate campaign mission is the climax, and the final mission is a hardcore copout. All of the tension is gone, there’s very little going on other than sequel hook for the season pass. That’s a little lazy, regardless of how you feel about missed opportunities or how much work was put into making the rest of it a pretty good experience overall.

TitanFall IS running on Dedicated Servers. It’s not a P2P system. There is no server browser nor you can rent a server but it is run by Microsoft’s azure dedicated servers which is a big difference in latency.

When the term “dedicated servers” is used nowadays, it usually means servers accessible via browser window that can be player ran.

Most recent AAA shooters use dedicated servers due to the issues of a P2P system. And most do not allow player ran servers. EA lets you “rent” BF servers.

All versions use Azure for matchmaking and matches.

Edit: if you can’t run the hosting server and set the server parameters, its not dedicated to the PC crowd. Regardless if it runs on one or not. Essentially its like a MMO or F2P game server structure. Their servers do all the matchmaking and host the game for all players.

If the infrastructure of the networks isn’t player side then Respawn/M$/EA have a ton of work to do to keep the game vibrant for an extended period of time. It might be great at its core, the game, but it will get stale after a while without more options on how to play in the game and out.

Dedicated server tools and mod tools should not be a hard order to fill. Its just not a priority, though I wonder wtf their priority really is besides making bank.

You can imagine an indie game with cut-down 3D graphics that takes the ideas in this and really runs with them. I suppose a lot of this kind of thing takes a ton of time to balance, but then you could just use Titanfall as inspiration and cut a lot of corners in iterating around stuff that doesn’t work dynamically.

Yes, this is my issue – the core gameplay sounds great, and I love the idea of Mirror’s Edge with Mechs. However, I’ve had multiplayer-centred games before where I played them for a couple of weeks before the community I was playing with moved on or I lost interest. All this costs upwards of £35, and in this case a rather large download for my overworked connection and hard drive that I really don’t want to have to clean out again for just one game. On this basis alone, I think I’ll pass. They might be right in making the business decision not to flesh out the single player experience and focus on the multiplayer, but this is the thing that would have drawn me personally towards it. I completely agree that it’s a waste of time to build separate engines for single player and multiplayer, though – stuff like Battlefield 3’s campaign must have cost a lot of money to make, and yet it was like they made a completely different game unrelated to the multiplayer.

The worst thing about Battlefield 3’s campaign was that they let you use all the vehicles from multiplayer (or most, anyway) but they behaved and controlled completely differently so it wasn’t even helpful as the learning aid it should have been.

The shame about that is that it’s actually quite hard to control the air vehicles in BF3, and the only way as far as I can see to learn them is to fly them in multiplayer, which will get you a lot of hate from people when you crash the jet after a few seconds or when you plane the only chopper into the ground with a full squad on board. One of those games where there’s a strong argument for making the single player a more scripted version of the online modes, or even just a skirmish mode like in BF1942.

Yeah, I’d love to see some of the gameplay design people talk about in Titanfall, not to mention the spectacular visuals, in a game that is properly singleplayer. Having a tiny amount of shoehorned story around basically a multiplayer match does not suffice, certainly not to get me to drop $60.

Which is cool. Titanfall being AAA opens doors to other, more ambitious titles in similar vein. Not that they were closed before, its just that now plenty of people will be instantly interested because it would be “like Titanfall”.

I’m not sure indies could rip off a lot there since TF’s two biggest moves can be summed up as “more polished” and “more backpatting” (with harmless AI skeet and a lot of stuff to emphasize power fantasies). Indies aren’t as good at the former and tend towards more challenging games than the latter.

But aren’t Titanfalls ‘best’ features it’s polish and it’s movement/animations? Things that require big teams and big budgets, surely? In terms of innovative ideas it’s pretty thin on the ground, just very careful, balanced design desisions around letting new players not feel like cannon fodder. Otherwise it’s just another sodding online FPS.

Something not mentioned in this review, how much replay value is there here?

Watching Total Biscuit’s WTF is… video made it look like there wasn’t much more to see from the game than showed in the beta. The customisation options didn’t look particular vast and what was there seemed like your standard fare, with only the Smart Pistol doing anything remotely unique. There were also a rather sparse selection of modes available, once again only aping modes we have seen countless times before.

I enjoyed my time with the beta and I am still interested in getting this, but I expect I will be holding back until I see a good deal on a complete package in year or so, with all the DLC.

This is a problem with the game and the reviews miss it. Great for twenty hours? Totally worn out after forty? It’s clearly got enough to last you a dozen hours but that’s not an amazing value proposition. There’s a lot more to master in Battlefield 4, even repetitive COD has more trinkets and varied modes to edge out the playtime.

There are… 6 Titan weapons? Each typically with 2 extensions. Some basic like added magazine. Some change the way how the weapons function

4 Ordnance choices.
3 Defense abilities to choose from.

2 passive ability tiers with 4-5 choices each.

Pilots are similar with more choices in primary weapons, sights and extensions, 4 sidearms.
They have Ordnance, active abilities, 2 passives.

Team Deathmatch, Last Titan Standing, CTF, Capture and Hold and Pilot Kills points are the game modes (may be missing one). Nothing innovative as you mention, although Last Titan Standing is different to a Last Man Standing. Once your Titan gone, as long as you eject you are still alive until killed. As the Wot, CTF stays differnt due to the parkour. Most maps are well done to enable parkouring along and up buildings with ease.

Seems as much content as any other multiplayer focused FPS. Probably will be a deal during the holidays.

Replay value is hard to tell. I meanpeople have been playing the same old counter strike for 10 plus years and don’t seem to get bored with it while some people like me got bored with it years ago. Its a multiplayer game if you like it there’s a lot of replay value, if you are one of those people that need a carrot to chase after maybe not so much. I imagine I will get quite a bit of hours out of it myself as I am enjoying the crap out of it and have friends to play with but others may get bored with it in a week. So to answer your question I would say the potential for high replay value is there but your milage will vary.

Counterstrike was a particularly extreme example of this because a lot of servers only ran a handful of maps, to the point where people had optimised de_dust2 and newcomers had no chance to make an impact on the game.

If replay value means more to you than “play enough to prestige ten times,” then there’s not really a ton of it here. One of the things I’m (vaguely) disappointed with is the relatively narrow pool of decisions to make as per your loadout. There’s only a handful of weapons, and though each of them have mods, they’re incremental changes to capabilities rather than game changers.

Titanfall is exactly what the shooter genre needed. It gets rid of the dozens of superfluous weapons that are all just slightly worse versions of whatever the best-in-class weapon is. It gets rid of the superfluous customization options that are all just slightly worse versions of whatever the best attachment is.

There’s a ton of people who are simply broken by the AAA game design and who think “Titanfall doesn’t have enough content” when what is really going is that Titanfall doesn’t have as big a skinner box. You play Titanfall because it’s FUN, not because there’s twenty dozen colour schemes to unlock for all your identical assault rifles.

His point isn’t that it’s brought ~wholly original weapons~, it’s the exact opposite: it’s stripped out the CoD-style “five different weapons per weapon class but they’re all slightly different from each other except for one which is the best” gun selection in favour of just giving you one weapon per weapon class.

Koozer is exactly right. My issue isn’t so much the quantity or that I want to be unlocking things for hours on end, more that what you can get just doesn’t seem interesting. You have assault rifle, shotgun, LMG, sniper rifle and pistol.

Given the sci-fi setting, I would hope for something a little more inspiring than that and it wouldn’t make a difference if they had 10 guns in each of those classes. Of course, this is a problem that is afflicting pretty much all modern shooters, so can’t really single Titanfall out for it.

The core game is great and with the additional maps I’m sure it will keep me playing for quite sometime. I just feel that they could have done more in this area, as well in a couple of other points (such as objective based missions for the campaign and a more prominent role for the AI besides farm.)

Are we really still having this argument? I thought battlefield 1942 and unreal tournament established that yes you can make a multiplayer only game. That is what they set out to do, and what they accomplished. Getting annoyed at the lack of a single player campaign is like me saying it sucks because I can’t change the combat to turn-based. All it dhows is that you are playing the wrong game for you, and that’s OK, but you shouldn’t insult the devs because they didn’t make the game YOU wanted, especially when they never claimed nor even hinted that they were going to.

Yeah, I think this is a crucial distinction. If the devs wanted to make a multiplayer game, that’s absolutely what they should make and they should save singleplayer story-based campaigns and such for another product. Or vice versa for a singleplayer game and multiplayer modes. There’s really no good reason to shoehorn the two types of gameplay into the same release and it does no favors to fans of either. However, even as someone who has no desire to play against human beings ever, full stop, you could conceivably get me to buy a multiplayer game design -if- it had strong hooks and strong bot support. Don’t include the bot support and your multiplayer game is useless to me.

Be fair, BF1942’s “campaign” was awful and its bots worse. There was nothing enjoyable about either, so while it may have had “bot support” no one in their right mind would’ve actually suffered through that for any extended period of time.

UT did have a nifty campaign and fantastic bot support. Bots that could be set to a dozen difficulty settings and tweaked individually for a variety of statistics like accuracy and turn rate! It’s too bad every game after that regressed in terms of bot support.

Technically Titanfall does have bots. It just won’t let you play against them exclusively. Even in a full server 95% of the characters on screen are bots. And if you’ve played the game for any extended amount of time, you won’t want any solo bot support. The bots in Titanfall are on-par with BF1942s. In other words: utterly worthless and uninteresting. It wouldn’t be fun to play against just bots, unless they put a ton of time into improving the AI.

I’ve bought plenty of MP-only games with no or a laughable token campaign but all of them had bot support. That’s my point. I can understand a 15$ downloadable title not having bots (though some of them still do) because bots are expensive to make but Titanfall wasn’t exactly a low-budget production.

It’s great! You get to run around really fast, you can double jump, you can run on walls! Also, it’s extremely cool to drop a mech (titan) on an enemy’s head. And then jump into it. I LOVE the animation where the screen is divided by four and eventually combines into one. Love it!

However. The game has its faults. Like, no proper matchmaking. You’ll get paired up against a full “generation 5+ team” (that’s level 50 x 5+) while the max level player in your team is 9. Now, level doesn’t equal skill. But USUALLY (not always) experience equals skill. And someone that has had a lot more experience with the game is USUALLY better.

Team Balance. It doesn’t exist. There is no auto team balance at all. If one team has 6 players and the other team has 1, nothing happens. It’s 6v1 until the game has ended. Period. Also, there’s no way for you to transfer to the other team even if you wanted to.

I’ve got more to say about it but my friends are calling so I have to play something.

Bottom line is, I really enjoy the game, it’s really fun! But it sure has its faults which no one seems to talk about. And those faults are big. Really big.

Thank you sir for these comments. It’s nice to know that someone at least has a little reason.

This game is for people who like games where you get insta-killed by a kick. I mean this is a game of robots and most people are running around and insta-kicking people to death.
Matchmaking sucks big time. The servers dont rotate players so you are stuck at a team that gets destroyed 100-400 all the time or you can relog and… get on a team that will get destroyed 150-300.
Bots are more of a distraction rather than a threat and basically just draw your attention from other pilots…
At the moment I can’t play for more than an hour without rage quitting at again being either camped or insta-kicked…

It has dedicated servers. Most Journalists claiming otherwise are simply idiots. It is not Peer to Peer. It runs on a separate server.
It doesn’t have USER HOSTED dedicated servers, but it DOES HAVE dedicated servers.

It has been pointed out multiple times, don’t play on words. This game does NOT have dedicated servers in the usual meaning of the word.

By your definition, pretty much every multiplayer game ever have dedicated server. We use the term dedicated server to talk about the server you can host yourself, usually on a dedicated machine. The only other kind of server is what we call “listen server”, which is basically the game client acting as a server aswell. And even in this case you could argue that the master server (if there is one, which you can be sure of in an AAA production) is a “dedi” aswell.

In my opinion, it’s you who’s changing the meaning of dedicated servers. Dedicated servers always stood apart from the alternative (player-hosted) servers because they performed better. Yes, the norm for a very long time was that dedicated servers were run by the community and selected through a server browser, but removing the community and throwing in a veneer of matchmaking instead of a browser doesn’t make them closer to the alternative.

1,2,3 are types of dedicated servers. Dedicated because there’s no client running on the same machine as the server. However, only 2 and 3 can be tweaked by a server admin who’s also a customer (and not in charge of maintaining the company’s official server as a paid job).

In 4, the user’s game launches a server which it connects through over a local socket as a client itself, and then others can connect to that same server. Not “dedicated” because it’s not running in pure server mode, the application is also running as a client itself.

Graham is complaining about a lack of 2 and 4, though i think 3 is missing too.

I believe that people who insist that Titanfall has dedicated servers are missing the point of the complaint. Most people don’t want user-hosted dedicated servers just for latency issues. They want them because they’re a very good way to build communities.

If you don’t have a circle of friends to play with (and a lot of people don’t), then you can hang out on the same servers, and you’ll end up knowing people, maybe making friends and forming or joining a clan. I know this is why I played Team Fortress Classic for so many years. Nowadays, this is why the TF2 players I know are still playing it after 1500 hours+. Because of the communities they’re part of, and everything that goes with them: the people, the running jokes, the silly sounds and commands installed on the server, the map rotation…

And people complaining about lack of dedicated servers are missing the FACTS. Titanfall has Dedicated Servers. It might not have the dedicated server options you LIKE, but it DOES have them. FACT. Claiming otherwise is simply WRONG.
You can complain about the way they deliver them, but don’t try and change definitions or distort the facts.

News flash. Its pretty obvious that complaints of a lack of dedicated servers are people using the term to refer to community supported, operated, and administered.

Whether the server is a dedi hosted by the publisher or is reliant on user hosting, most people identify them by the matchmaking system, and similarly they do the same with the ones that let players join a persistent iteration with all options managed by the community administrators.

If EA offered clans and communities the option to pay for a rental of global dedi server space that would create a separate matchmaking string that guided players into their area of the dedicated publisher run servers then that would not illicit these kinds of complaints.

This is a stupid argument about semantics. The spirit of the complaint has nothing to do with who’s hosting it, but what the players can do with it.

It also means that the game doesn’t die just because the publisher decides to drop support for it. Want to play a game of original (QuakeWorld) Team Fortress today? Not a problem. Even though Quake itself came out almost 20 years ago you can find servers online or set up your own. Even if it’s just you and some friends getting together to play a game you all used to play back in college you still have the option. When a game relies on company-owned servers and especially when it’s a multiplayer game it means that the company will always own the game and will eventually retire it when they see fit, not when the community does.

i feel the systems they set up here could accommodate an AWESOME single player campaign (im thinking on the line of the humongous platformy levels of the first jedi knight or wide open levels of farcry/crysis , although those would need more buildings), its sad they dismissed the opportunity like they did, the sp doesnt need to be the godawful crap cod/battlefield sp is, do better!

i love how responsive the game is, having played warframe recently i was horribly put off by the clunkyness of that game’s movements and controls when compared to titanfall where everything just works buttery smooth (except getting stuck in the scenery, it seems to be better than the beta but it could also be that i subconsciously learned to avoid small obstacles)

I remain convinced that when Destiny comes out, this game will simply be forgotten in the console-space, and I’m not entirely convinced it’ll gain enough traction in the PC space in the first place. Titanfall 2, maybe.

yeah its got that potential. IF they surprise us all and really do well with post launch support and incorporate player feedback rather than just pumping out 10 dollar map packs this series could really take off.

Nah, PC vs console is prevented by console manufacturers wanting to breed their monopoly. Especially with paid online services. Back in the GFWL Gold days where MS tried to push paid online play onto PC players, sure, they’d allow cross platform play but with GFWL being rightfully aborted they’re now thinking that they won’t let you play with their paying customers when you’re not paying them the monthly fee.

It will never be a classic though. All classic shooters have had long lives thanks entirely to LAN support. This doesn’t even have the server code available to allow communities to form in any coherent fashion within the game’s architecture.

Not worth the money. It’s 2014, and value is king. Too bad, because it looks like a fun idea that could have been really nice if there had been a 25 hour single-player campaign.

Where do teenagers get the money for games like this? Who has the time to hang around looking for 9 other people to play a game with? If I wanted to play team sports, I’d be outside with a bat in my hand, hoping there were 17 other players available with a few hours to kill. Or, for you brits, a wicket.

As someone who just bought this and has been playing, I had an issue where I could load into maps, but it would take too long and I would end up being booted with a server timeout error. It may not be your issue, but id suggest drastically lowering the graphic settings. I had to put textures down to medium before the game would run well enough for me to play.

I love how RPS can critique a title, describe a fun game with a positive conclusion WITHOUT becoming part of the hype machine like all the 5/5 Sesslers did.

It’s alarming how little it took this game to distract reviewers long enough for them to publish 5/5 and 10/10 that are misleading at best.

I tried the Titanfall beta for a week only but here is what I saw:
-It’s a fun game but not a great game. It’s devoid of passion that can be seen in great games from genuine and proud developers.When I played it I didn’t feel like it’s a great game in the making, it was a beginning of a gigantic money making franchise, very similar to the one that Respawn was cast out from and that one used to be good too, many sequels ago. Titanfall is a cold and calculated attempt to capture a user base as large as possible.

-Respawn didn’t omit a single player campaign to spare us from it, they did it to cut costs all the while maintaining the illusion, one which most critics ate up completely, that it would have been a great single player campaign, Genius move, if you suck at single player, don’t make one. Had they made one, they would have exposed their roots too much. This way they maintain that spotless outfit of a clean slate developer house.

-The atrocious AI (FEAR AI would wipe the floor with these grunts) and the smart pistol are there to ensure that people who normally don’t do well in shooters can do good enough so that they buy the DLC and the sequels.
This makes COD look like it has more backbone because the lesson Respawn decided to walk away with from Activision is that game mechanics need to bend over backwards to pick up sales from people who don’t typically buy sequels of games they didn’t do well in.

-Because of the hype and insane amount of dry coverage on sites like IGN that artificially kept Titanfall in the headlines, people started accusing Respawn of bribery. Respawn became defensive but with a weird stance. Respawn defended itself as if it’s a indie developer house, which is hilarious because it’s partners are Microsoft, which paid to keep the game away from it’s rival’s console and the other Titanfall partner is none other than EA.

It’s fun ripping apart only games that (somehow) achieved perfect review scores especially ones where user and critic scored differ as much as with TF. Tribes, a game TF clearly got it’s inspiration from, for what it’s worth, has it’s critic reviews and user scores in near perfect sync.

TL;DR Good games sell well is a concept abandoned for a well selling game is a good game.

Bit of a left turn at the traffic lights, but has anyone ever done experiments where the AI from different games is put into another game and made to fight each other, and see which wins? I think that would be Quite Interesting.

Maybe they should have used all that money they spent for hyping the damn thing and used the space saved by not using uncompressed WAV sound files to make bigger maps, allow more human players, and infantry gun dynamics that aren’t copy/pasted from Modern Warfare 2.

Hell, the high tech parkour in a game with better shooting would have been amazing, and they would have had to get a court order to stop me from throwing money at them.

I always looked forward to games weighing in at 50GB, 100GB, Silly me, I thought that implied more and better content and not that 70% of install size are audio files bloat. Respawn’s explanation for the audio bloat is to alleviate the CPU workload on low end rigs…

I once programmed a game with uncompressed wav files as the soundtrack. But that was because I was part of a student team and the music team didn’t know how to save their work in midi format and Game Maker didn’t support mp3 at the time and we ran out of time to do it right. I didn’t want to do it that way because having the soundtrack take up over a hundred times the disc space of the rest of the game was just ridiculous but since the whole thing could still just fit on a CD, the matter was given super low priority.

So apparently the sound team for Titanfall is exactly as competent at their jobs as a bunch of fresh-out-of-high-school kids working together on their very first game that has a three month development schedule.

That is a very strange argument. It seems odd to me that a company would devote considerable resources to audio fidelity, but there you go. Also I find it a little odd that decompressing audio files is slower than streaming larger files from the hard drive, but I suppose it depends which part of the computer is doing the work.

Damn straight. I don’t know how far they changed Source but from what I know the base MP code supports 256 players maximum per map. 32 players flying around and piloting titans would be fantastic, it would seriously be pushing the xbone, but PC would handle it quite well.

No, they designed maps for 12 players. This isn’t the UT days anymore where you’d get a huge variety of maps and modes each indicating an optimum player count, we’re so advanced we can only produce small pools of same size maps now! Any deviation from the holy pattern of FPS gameplay provided by the Emperor himself is heresy!

To tell truth, I’m not sure if that’s developers mindset or if there’s some problem with Source Engine. Maybe I should check some mods if they have requirement of at least 32 players on map to start being fun, but most of game-maps made on Source are quite small. Biggest ones I could name would be in Left 4 Dead, but they are long while thin.

I know TF2 support 24 players without problems, but that’s only twice as many in Titanfall (and Titanfall can have up to 30-or-more bots running around along with players, right?). On the other hand, my quite-old laptop remembers few Portal 2 maps that loaded longer then they took to get to exit…

Edit: friend says there is Empires Mod which in-his-opinion is boring without 30 people, but on the other hand maps lack details…

I wouldn’t have thought this was the Source engine we all know and love. It doesn’t even feel like the Source engine, for one, it feels more like the CoD fork of the Quake 3 engine.

Both the CoD engine and Source run on a base of the Q3 engine, and I would have thought this is the exact reason they used Source for Titanfall, but I’d have said it was only used for having similar, low level compatibility, meaning it would have been (theoretically) easy to take the CoD engine and superimpose it onto Source.

Another thing that signals alarm bells that it isn’t really Source, is that it runs like absolute balls. Source is an impressively optimised engine, and for Titanfall to run quite so poorly (a bit like, tadaaa, Call of Duty games – look at Ghosts, for instance), it just stinks this really isn’t Source as we know it. Just look at the things that have carried over from CoD; the shit FoV, the broken and shit Vsync options, the shit graphics details of the game while running like Crysis 3, the shit stuttering when going anywhere above 60fps, the shit dual-card optimisation (Source games have this out the bat), the lack of even a shit server browser (again, Source out the bat), the fact you can’t change certain graphics options while anywhere other than the first shit menu, etc, etc, etc, etc.

As a long time FPS fan, this is a must-try-game. The movement is so amazing, there is a big learning curve, you’re permanently finding new and new things.. Like when you realize that to capture a inside-building point, you don’t need to stand near it, just just constantly float through the room, while incoming enemies have no idea where you are. Like when you catapult simultaneously with the enemy, only to give him shotty-hello right in his face up in the air :) Or when you killed 5 of NPCs with continual flying ninja kick only to realize that one of them was actual pilot :D Yes, I am biased but this game is just something I have been waiting for a long time.. <3 Respawn ! :)

Considering its expected longevity, why does Titanfall have to cost so much? It’s pure AAA culture. I believe there’s such a thing as overproduced games: why would you invest millions of dollars in a game without a proportionate amount of content? Only so that you can charge inordinate sums for it afterwards. And DLC to boot, to the point they are necessary simply to justify the incredible figures splurged into making the game while still keeping it profitable. It’s something of a vicious cycle.

“There are no dedicated servers of any kind. There is no support for establishing or maintaining clans. There will never be any mods. Titanfall is currently £45 from Origin.” (gratuitous period added)

Those three sentences just negated what otherwise would have been a guaranteed purchase. EA, you just ruined the entire PvZ franchise by making short-sighted decisions about how to publish and “monetize” the sequels. Why do you feel the need to do the same to Titanfall?

no server browser, no balancing, no team switching – and it does in fact use servers though – they are dynamically allocated from xbox live pool – just not *proper* servers than you or I could co-locate or run ourselves.

So…..its brink, without the writing? Or dedicated servers? And uses origin….but has titans.
I’m torn. I want titans but am not willing to buy into EAs “£60 now and more later for a game we won’t really support” way of doing things.

There’s a good point to be made in responding to the community and fixing problems, but there’s an even better one in not ignoring common features that have been standard for the past twenty years. This isn’t a small, iteratively-developed indie game that got pushed out quickly to keep funding development, this is a major, heavily-marketed release. It just shows inattention to detail.

I haven’t really enjoyed an FPS since Bad Company 2, but I am addicted to Titanfall. Great balance, satisfying movement and weapons, some MOBA-style mechanics I wasn’t expecting and… some of the worst videogame writing I’ve ever encountered. While I dig the campaign maps (especially how they implement the story-driven Attrition maps) the way they’re structured and written is horrible.

Otherwise, though I’m really rather enchanted with this game. And enough good things can’t be said about the NPC system.

So this sounds like a mash up of Brink and Planetside 1 BFRs. There can be no doubt that the devs played both of those games while thinking about the design of this game. I’m not sure why Brink didn’t do better in sales. It was different and fun if a little short on longevity just like Titanfall.